Lastly, there is the evidence of the Paycocke wills, of which three are preserved at Somerset House—­the will of John Paycocke (d. 1505), Thomas’s father and the builder of the house; the will of Thomas Paycocke himself (d. 1518); and the will of his nephew Thomas, the same whose brass lies in the aisle and who left a long and splendidly detailed testament, full of information upon local history and the organization of the cloth industry.  For social historians have as yet hardly, perhaps, made as much use as they might of the evidence of wills.  The enormous amount of miscellaneous information to be derived therefrom about the life of our forefathers can hardly be believed, save by those who have turned the pages of such a collection as the great Testamenta Eboracensia.[4] In wills you may see how many daughters a man could dower and how many he put into a nunnery, and what education he provided for his sons.  You may note which were the most popular religious houses, and which men had books and what the books were, how much of their money they thought fit to leave for charitable purposes, and what they thought of the business capacity of their wives.  You may read long and dazzling lists of family plate, all the favourite cups and dishes having pet names of their own, and of rings and brooches and belts and rosaries.  There are detailed descriptions of dresses and furs, sometimes splendid, sometimes ordinary, for people handed on their rich clothes as carefully as their jewels.  There are even more wonderful descriptions of beds, with all their bedclothes and hangings, for a bed was a very valuable article of furniture and must often, judging from the wills, have been a brilliant and beautiful object indeed; Shakespeare has earned a great deal of unmerited obloquy for leaving Ann Hathaway his second-best bed, though it is not to be denied that he might have left her his first-best.  Even more beautiful than dressings and bed or chamber hangings are the brocaded and embroidered vestments mentioned in wills, and the elaborate arrangements for funeral ceremonies are extremely interesting.  The wills are of all kinds; there are even villeins’ wills, though in theory the villein’s possessions were his lord’s, and there are wills of kings and queens, lords and ladies, bishops and parsons and lawyers and shopkeepers.  Here also is more evidence for the social prosperity of the middle class, details of their trade, the contents of their shops, the inventories of their houses, their estates (sometimes) in the country, their house rents (almost always) in the town, their dressers garnished with plate and their wives’ ornaments, their apprentices and their gilds, their philanthropy, their intermarriage with the gentry, their religious opinions.  Such a living picture do men’s wills give us of their daily lives.